Top Story

Michael Lewis' new book "Flash Boys" has whipped up a furious tornado of criticism about high frequency trading. But the market and regulators need to resist the urge to ban the practice and instead embrace the notion of high frequency monitoring and surveillance.

Top Story

International banks and other global private entities need to ensure that they do more than pay lip service to the data privacy laws of sovereign states, writes Andrew Waxman of IBM's consulting practice.

Top Story

The SEC’s proposed Regulation SCI is intended to protect market technology from outages and technical glitches. But industry commentators contend the rule doesn’t include all market participants and underestimates the implementation costs. Here are five areas that market participants would like to change.

Top Story

Michael Lewis' new book "Flash Boys" has whipped up a furious tornado of criticism about high frequency trading. But the market and regulators need to resist the urge to ban the practice and instead embrace the notion of high frequency monitoring and surveillance.

Top Story

With the threat of rising rates on the horizon, banks are relying on existing “technologies” to avert the danger, such as duration risk, VaR and dynamic simulation, writes David Renz of SunGard's Ambit Treasury Management solution.

Register for this webinar to learn how to get a competitive edge from high performance computing—in addition to saving time and reducing hardware expenditures. Let our experts show you how your company can benefit from high performance computing.

Increased regulatory burdens, a flagging refinance market and increased competition from independent mortgage shops require adapting to change swiftly. Many of today’s back office systems and management processes do not support the pending reality.

Internet and mobile banking are quickly replacing the original purpose of your bank’s branch offices – to manage deposits, withdrawals and other transaction. However, there is significant evidence that maintaining a presence in your community in the form of a physical branch is still very important. Register for this webinar to learn banking best practices that you can use to reinvent your branches and put an end to paper processes.

Please join John Fraser, Vice President, Technology and Operations Services - US Bank, to uncover what it takes to set up and scale e-signatures to support multiple lines of business in your financial institution.

This webinar will discuss how IBM is helping banks and financial institutions implement dynamic investigation processes. The solution leverages powerful content capture, classification, case management and content analytics capabilities that result in a reduction in the resources needed to collect and assimilate data, eliminating manual steps, and progressing toward a ‘just in time’ approach to fighting fraud.

This webinar will explore cross-channel behavior among bank customers, and why cross-channel strategies will be critical to the future of banking. The session will include predictions about the future of banking, and high-level recommendations for providers.

In this webinar, a panel of operational risk experts discuss how external data elements can assist risk managers and professionals in their operational risk programmes, particularly informing scenarios and assessments and also providing tail events for models.

Join Bank Systems & Technology and Kony to explore the mobility trends that will have the most on impact how financial institutions deliver enterprise-grade mobile apps to commercial customers and learn strategies for creating a mobility platform that maximizes mobile app development.

Continued growth- whether organically or through M&A - is vital for a bank's ongoing health. But with growth comes challenges, particularly in the area of Customer Communications Management. Without question, optimizing and modernizing customer communications is essential for banks that are looking to grow. However, banks that are still using legacy systems and old processes to generate customer communications may find that their systems are holding them back.

Banks are looking for new ways to increase profitability. Enabling mobile bill payment is a huge opportunity to forge stronger and more lasting bonds with their customers as a mean means to increase profitability. According to Aite Group, only about 15 percent of U.S consumers' currently pay their bills through their banks. Banks looking to seize this "85% opportunity" face considerable competition, not to mention the current difficulties in onboarding payees. Overcoming these barriers will improve banks' ability to attract and retain mobile banking users, especially the increasingly important 20- to 35-year-olds who rely on their smartphones to handle most tasks and transactions in their lives.

For the last decade, the payments industry has rapidly become one of the most dynamic growth drivers in financial services. Traditional payment methods have evolved, new methods have been introduced and new entrants have emerged. The result is a significant increase in payment transaction volumes amidst a highly competitive and specialized industry.

Improving the transparency and efficiency of the trade lifecycle is critical in today’s fast-paced trading environment. OTC derivatives regulatory reform will present significant challenges for all market participants. With ever increasing regulatory requirements, improving the transparency and efficiency of the trade document lifecycle is critical. Those that can fully automate each step of the process to reduce risk and achieve compliance will gain a competitive edge.

Competing in the financial services landscape is as complex as ever with players existing in an ever-changing environment with new pressures from regulations, customer expectations and margin compression. Firms deal with a broad set of product and service offerings that traditionally may have been handled in silos, but are now expected to be consistent in client experience, risk management and more. These changes are directly affecting the way firms look at their revenue management practices including pricing and billing. As the market continues to transform, there will be firms that respond appropriately and will be clear winners.

The complexity and competitiveness of the financial services industry demands a robust sales enablement capability. The type of system that enables a true 360 degree view of the customer by integrating and correlating all relevant data and content. Does your firm empower its sales executives and services reps with everything they need to drive acquisition, retention, and cross selling? Join industry experts Julio Gomez and Jim Dickie as they highlight the evolution of sales enablement and unveil the next generation approach that will quickly become a requirement in today’s fiercely competitive landscape.

Many IT shops are still relying on outdated capacity management approaches that have not been designed to deal with the high-density, highly-automated, demand-driven virtual and cloud environments of today. As such. they are struggling with solutions that were designed for a bygone physical era when environments were static and planning was less frequent – solutions that are simply not useful in today’s modern world. Cloud and virtual infrastructures demand more sophisticated methods, while infrequent management approaches must give way to more continuous control and modern capacity control systems need to determine where to place workloads and how to size infrastructure in order to minimize operational risks and significantly reduce key costs.

Your organization is handling hundreds, thousands or even millions of interactions every day. What if you could improve the timing and outcomes of those interactions by automating your day-to-day operational decisions with business rules? What if you could infuse those decisions with pin-point accuracy and the fidelity of a subject matter expert?

Financial institutions are facing expanded stress testing requirements, adding to the complexity of day-to-day operations. . While this more prescriptive oversight and operational burden historically may not be welcome by most, this new focus on risk management presents an important opportunity for financial institutions to rethink their approach to the discipline.

In this webinar, IDC Financial Insights explores the challenges and solutions the financial industry faces in providing both protection from attacks and strategies that improve the customer experience. While mobile, cloud, social networking provide significant convenience to customers, and business benefits to the financial industry, they also provide a growing base of opportunities for cyber-attacks designed to steal, tarnish reputations, and cause financial harm.

Financial services companies, whether insurers or banks, are not shy about the possibilities for mobile technology to improve their customer relations or organizational agility. But mobile technology advances rapidly, and that puts pressure on companies' development organizations to discover and implement capabilities that leverage the main attractions of the channel -- location awareness and anytime, anywhere access -- on devices of different form factor or capabilities. Indeed, three years after the introduction of the iPad, tablet computers are poised to outstrip traditional PCs and become the major online portal for many financial services customers.

Financial institutions spend billions of dollars on firewalls, proxies, routers and other devices to prevent unauthorized access to their network, but security breaches continue to plague the industry.

Today’s investors are more hands on and more likely to actively seek investment advice. Research shows that investors who communicate and collaborate with their advisor electronically pay more for the guidance they receive. But most financial firms -- saddled with traditional, siloed CRM systems -- struggle to engage with their clients through digital channels while maintaining the same level of advice, service and regulatory compliance as traditional methods of communication.

Retail banking is facing many challenges as technology allows customers to choose from diverse banking options, from branch banking to smart phones. Banks have also extended their reach from local to national and global markets. Without the consistent customer engagement models that were successful in the past, how can financial institutions measure and monitor success with a whole new set of engagement models?